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It’s time for Britain to smell the coffee – Firstpost

It’s time for Britain to smell the coffee – Firstpost



Britain is undergoing a massive crisis these days. The ghosts of the grooming gangs that molested and sexually abused underage girls in the country are back to haunt the government even as it is dodging every single demand for a fair inquiry. What complicates things further is that the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a man who himself is at the centre of the storm. There are multiple allegations against him for silencing the victims and emboldening the perpetrators of this ghastly crime during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008-2013. But even as Starmer and his safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, are still rejecting a demand for a national inquiry, Starmer has earned the ire of the British-Indian community with his much uncalled-for remarks.

Despite many sane voices cautioning Prime Minister Starmer against the use of the blanket term ‘Asian Grooming Gangs’, he continues to use the term, thus leading to an outrage by the Indian community in Britain. While defending himself against Elon Musk’s charged attack, Starmer still used the phrase ‘Asian Grooming Gangs’ instead of ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ thus taking away the burden of blame from the real perpetrators and shifting it on the very law-abiding British-Indian community. This when inquiry after inquiry has proven that the grooming gangs are dominated by people of Pakistani origin only. But such is the desperation among British politicians to bad-mouth India that they can borrow blames of others’ crimes and shift them to the people of Indian origin.

They say old habits die hard, and if you look at the way British political dispensation behaves with India to date, this saying would appear to be a lot more true. A country that colonised India, erased its civilisational glory, planted myths to send Indians on a collective trip of inferiority, and even made the country suffer a terrible loss of territory through an arbitrary partition is not willing to mend its ways even in the 21st century. If the twentieth century was all about direct colonisation of India by Great Britain, then the current century is dominated by a tendency to promote separatist forces, endanger the country’s national security, and defame India at the international level.

In 2022, clocking a GDP of $3.53 trillion, India, which is a former colony of the United Kingdom, overtook its coloniser to become the fifth largest economy in the world. This definitely was a huge sign of the country’s arrival as the next big thing, where in a matter of a few years, India is poised to become the third largest economy in the world, behind only the US and China. But for the UK, it was a moment of great humbling as a country whose riches it had plundered for two centuries was now bigger than its own economy despite all the loot.

The reactions that had come to this feat of India from Britain were partly amusing but also very revealing of how low they think of India even today. For instance, a section of British media immediately resorted to shaming India for its per capita income, an age-old trope to embarrass post-colonial and developing countries for something for which colonial past and an unfair trading system are also responsible. Many in the political establishment even saw it as a ‘loss of status’ for the UK to be overtaken by a country that was once under the thumb of the British crown.

If India’s achievements in the economic domain were already too unpalatable for them, the geopolitical manifestations of the country’s rise were further going to perturb them in a big way. In fact, if there is one country that has repeatedly shamed India for its independent foreign policy, where it has refused to follow the whips from the West on the Russia-Ukraine war, then it has to be none other than the United Kingdom. How can we forget then UK Trade Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan’s very public warning to India that its stand on the Russia-Ukraine war would definitely impact the trade talks between the two countries? Even Britain’s deputy prime minister at that time, Dominic Raab, had also tried to lecture India on how it should conduct itself on the issue.

No matter how hard the politicians in the UK are trying to dictate terms to their former colony, the fact is that the ship of imperialism has sailed, and no government in India worth its salt is willing to obey the ex-colonial masters’ instructions today. This has caused a significant amount of heartburn among British politicians who are now deploying very cheap theatrics to get India to ‘behave’.

In November 2024, several lawmakers of the ruling Labour Party were found attending an event organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Sikhs, a pro-Khalistan group. The party has a long history of supporting separatist movements in India, including the Kashmir issue and the Khalistani separatism as well. This was when a resolution seeking international intervention in Kashmir during an annual conference under former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had cost the party British Indian votes in the 2019 General Elections.

Despite this electoral backlash from the Indian-origin community, the pandering to separatists by British politicians doesn’t stop at all. Case in point being the Sikh Federation, a Khalistani outfit masquerading as an NGO for British Sikhs. The group is known to have conducted many anti-India events promoting Khalistani separatism, but guess what? In December last year, UK Security Minister Jan Dervis wrote a letter to them addressing their ‘concerns’ of being harassed by Indian authorities at the airports. The same letter also professed solidarity with the Canadian government over the diplomatic row that erupted after the murder of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom the West portrays as a Sikh activist, a human rights activist, and other such absolutely incorrect labels.

Despite the best attempts by the Labour Party and other actors in the country to scare India into submission and clip the wings of its ‘India First’ foreign policy under PM Narendra Modi, the truth is that statistics do a great job of busting the bubble of British supremacy. Further, India is home to a large, vibrant, young population, an unexplored demographic dividend, and one of the largest emerging markets in the world. Britain, on the other hand, is home to a mere 67 million people, that too, an ageing population requiring more expenses on healthcare and pensions. It is anybody’s guess who needs the Free Trade Agreement more.

Post-Brexit, the UK is desperate to seek trade ties with a large market like India, and obviously this won’t happen until it tones down some of the anti-India sentiments. The time for British politicians is to smell the coffee and take a hard look at the calendar because a quarter of the current century has already passed, and the rest of the remaining century has India written all over it.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.



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